Minnesota Zen master

Born in the Midwest to a fundamentalist Christian family which frowned on entertainment, Garrison Keillor's main ambition was to write. But he first worked as a radio presenter and went on to make his mark by broadcasting comic tales of a fictional small town, Lake Wobegon. His quirky stories and novels, with some echoes of autobiography, are now bestsellers, writes Nicholas Wroe

Just before Christmas last year, Garrison Keillor, Garry Trudeau and Al Franken met for dinner at a New York hotel. Despite the absence of Michael Moore, this informal meeting of friends was in effect the high command of the American satiric opposition in session. Trudeau's treatment of the Bush administration in his Doonesbury cartoon strip is well known to Guardian readers and the thesis behind Franken's best selling book, Lies And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right (2003), needs little further explanation. However, to many people in the UK, Keillor would not be naturally bracketed in this category. He is more generally seen as a rather folksy and avuncular figure whose tales of life in his fictional Minnesota home town, Lake Wobegon, have provided a soothingly wry view of life in small-town America. That description of him still applies, but particularly in the US Keillor has also built himself a reputation as a consistently astringent critic of the Right.

"But when I talk about politics it is in a very light-handed and in-passing way," his reassuringly rich-timbred voice slowly deadpans in his apartment the next day. "Republicans might be heathens and out to destroy all that we hold dear, but that doesn't mean we need to take them seriously. Or be bitter or vituperative just because they are swine. I think one can still have friends who are Republicans."

The three men were meeting after a live New York broadcast of Keillor's long-running radio show, A Prairie Home Companion, which for two thirds of its season goes on the road, the other third coming from Minnesota Public Radio in St Paul. Among the usual combination of sketches, poems, live music and, of course, Keillor's monologue with news from Lake Wobegon, "where all the women are strong, all the men all good looking and all children are above average", Franken had played Henry Kissinger in a sketch, and Keillor had woven in a running joke about Republicans. Keillor started the show 30 years ago after a visit to the legendary Nashville country music radio programme Grand Ole Opry.

The novelist and critic Jane Smiley, who has written extensively about life in the Midwest, says that from the beginning Keillor "seemed to set himself up in a sort of loving opposition to Midwestern values. He'd hold up these values for amusement and you had the feeling that while he was aware of their virtues, he didn't precisely share them." Franken says that while Keillor "is clearly a Democrat, he is not overtly political on the show. But his politics have become more salient in recent years and the tone of his gentle jibes does tweak his targets in a way that may sometimes be more effective than the type of humour I use, which is to go straight at them."

Keillor explains: "I am culturally quite conservative and being a writer is the purest form of entrepreneurship there is. And I am a Christian and had a fundamentalist upbringing and Republicans assume all fundamentalists are on their side. So I am a sort of conservative Democrat and the Republicans do find that odd." A review in the conservative journal, National Review, typifies the Right's frustration. It complains about his "moralising about the moralists" and categorises him as "a horrid left-liberal scold, dripping with contempt for nearly everything Middle American, who has grown rich and famous off ridiculing his fellow Minnesotans for the benefit of smirking elites everywhere".

Peter A Scholl, professor of English at Luther College, Iowa, has written a critical biography of Keillor and says that his style of humour is in a long tradition of American literary comedy. "But he is not just a parasitic revivalist of those traditions," says Scholl. "He may take on the pose of the crackerbarrel philosopher, a 19th-century yarnspinner, but he also revitalised these modes and traditions, and he adopted modes and played roles that had little precedent in those earlier times."

The novelist and critic Alison Lurie sees a distinction between English humour, which tends to understatement, and American, which enjoys overstatement. "In one of his early stories a man has dug a car, which had been used as a septic tank, out from a field and is dragging it down Main Street to the dump," she says. "Coming the other way is the homecoming queen in her robes and a crown, who is on an ancient army tank garlanded with flowers. Both these things are funny in themselves and then their meeting on Main Street is also funny. He really piles it on in a way that very rarely happens in English humorous writing. But in America, which is a big country, the bigger it is the funnier it is."

As a writer, Keillor's career began in earnest when he first sold a story to the New Yorker in 1970. Happy to be Here, his first collection of Lake Wobegon stories, was published in 1982 and he has gone on to write nine more books since. As a young writer in the early 1970s he would go on driving trips through central Minnesota to remote towns where he would sit in coffee shops just to listen to the conversations. Friends and family say they can easily identify the sources of characters in his books and he has also drawn on his own life. A cursory glance at the synopsis of his latest novel, Love Me, published here this week, suggests some biographical echoes. The story is about an ambitious Minnesota writer who makes it to a cubicle at the New Yorker magazine but finds when he gets there that his political, emotional and creative equilibrium have been disastrously disturbed. Of course, Keillor's literary and radio personae are sturdy creations, not autobiographical facsimiles, but he nevertheless acknowledges the importance of his own experiences. "You use almost everything from your life," he says. "It's your material. Every story starts with some piece of fact and in anything I've ever written you'll be able to find that fact even if it's just a tiny sliver of a thing. In the case of this new book the ambition to write for the New Yorker is a fact but all the singing in a choir is fiction. The apartment where they go to make love is a fact but the jazz concert in Minneapolis is fiction. Why invent everything? We've all had a life so use what you have. And in the final work these are the places where the tyre meets the pavement."

Gary Edward Keillor - he didn't adopt the ostensibly more literary Garrison until submitting poems to magazines while in high school - was born in Anoka, a small town outside Minneapolis, in 1942. His father sorted mail on the train between St Paul and Jamestown, North Dakota, before working as a carpenter converting basements into living space. The family were Plymouth Brethren and Keillor was the third of six children. Although he left the sect as a young man, he says he has "no choice but to accept that it was a very happy upbringing. I did grow up among fundamentalist people whose theology was very stark and absolute. But to their own children and relatives they were nothing but kind and generous and being among Christian people meant that cruelty was profoundly repressed. When outsiders look at this upbringing they look at the long list of prohibitions. But none of that bothers you as a child. You never went to movies or dances and so it seemed a perfectly reasonable way to grow up."

They lived in an area that is suburbia now but was country then and where farmers still ploughed fields with horses. He had "all the fears and trepidations of a kid and also all sorts of religious spooks to deal with as well. But it was a fine life. There were ravines and woods and places to go where you were never under adult observation. The Mississippi river was a stone's throw away and in the summer you could get to an island. It was a childhood that belonged to the 20s and 30s but was still true for us in the 50s." Keillor remembers himself in high school as "a pale, awkward lad of no great acumen" whose nickname was "Foxfart or Doc or Spaz". But Bill Pederson, who met Keillor on their first day at school in 1948 and went on to become a senior hospital administrator, says Keillor was both "very clever and very very kind. And he was well liked because he was such a nice kid. If I had been asked then which child would become a writer I would have said Gary. There was no question about that. But he was very quiet in high school and so the entertaining part has come out of the blue. That is not something he did when he was younger."

When Keillor went to the University of Minnesota in 1960 to read English he was an earnest young man. "When I look back on my early 20s I don't find drunkenness and I find great sexual caution, which wasn't that unusual. This was before the pill and the life of a college student was so different just a few years later." But he responded to a sense of cultural excitement - Bob Dylan had recently begun his journey from Minnesota to greatness - and a wave of political change. He was a strong supporter of JFK even though his parents believed Christians shouldn't take part in the affairs of the world. "They also thought they should stay apart from the whole business of selling your personality. Influence and hobnobbing where friendship and business intersect really went against my parents' theology. They looked with great suspicion upon wealthy people. They found it hard to imagine any good way they could have got rich. For my parents, wealth implied corruption and while my politics might not have fitted with that exactly, it also wasn't at odds with it."

From 1960 to 1968 Keillor was attached to the university. He dropped out for a time in 1962 to work for a local newspaper but even when he was on campus he spent most of his time working on a college newspaper and literary magazine - "to the verge of being kicked out of school" - and for the college radio station. Keillor married Mary Guntzel in 1965 while still a student. Their son, Jason, who works for Keillor's radio production company, was born in 1969. The couple divorced in 1976 and Guntzel died in 1998. She had worked with mentally handicapped adults in Minnesota, one of the major characters in Love Me is based closely on her and the book is dedicated to her memory. "I really admired her," says Keillor. "She was someone who found herself when she dared to take a role championing people who were not capable of standing up for themselves. Her great cause was working with people coming out of state-run hospitals who were not used to having civil rights and being independent. It was something that deeply engaged her in ways that being married to a writer and moving in a writer's circle did not. She found it awkward and painful and it made her feel self-conscious and inferior."

Throughout the 60s Keillor's primary ambition was to write, but it was radio that first provided him with an income, although he saw the work as "a fallback, something anybody could do and get paid for". Bill Kling, president of Minnesota Public Radio, which still broadcasts A Prairie Home Companion, remembers Keillor applying for a job as a classical-music announcer in 1969. "He had a good voice and he knew how to pronounce the names of the classical composers. And he wasn't asking for any specific salary," recalls Kling. Keillor then "hardly spoke to anyone," says Kling. "He was the 'shy Norwegian bachelor farmer' he talked about." But despite any off-mike reticence, Keillor was a natural broadcaster.

Suzanne Weil was head of performing arts at the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis in the late 60s. She remembers his morning radio show where he would play records - "Mahler would be followed by the Beach Boys" - and tell Lake Wobegon stories. "It was a cult around town. Every morning at the office people would talk about what they had heard on the way to work." It was Weil who got Keillor into poetry readings and she can claim some credit for his later radio career when she put him and some musician friends in a show called A Prairie Home Entertainment. "It was around the same time that he first appeared in the New Yorker," she says. "Of course it was a big thing for him, but there were a lot of us who knew him and his work who were very excited as well."

Keillor's first New Yorker story was a 400-word cod newspaper article called "Local Family Keeps Son Happy". New Yorker fiction editor Roger Angell says he remembers it "just came in over the counter and it was terrific. It was about the parents of this 16-year-old boy who were worried that he was rather quiet and unresponsive. So they moved in a local prostitute for him and his problems disappeared. One of her accomplishments was cooking 'fancy eggs' and he ended the piece with the recipe. I'd never seen anything like that before and it was just wonderful. We got in touch with him straight away and he began to send us some great stuff."

With the New Yorker paying close to $1,000 for each story, Keillor was able to earn a living from writing and he gave up radio in 1973. The rent on his home was just $80 a month. The following year the New Yorker assigned him to write about the Grand Ole Opry, which inspired him to put together his own show and the first A Prairie Home Companion was broadcast later that year. Jason Keillor says he grew up with the show. "I remember my mother driving the musicians and artists back and forth to performances and then me picking up popcorn from between the seats after the show." He says his father "had some tough years" in the late 60s and early 70s until his morning radio show propelled him into A Prairie Home Companion. "Suddenly he was speaking to a group of people that public radio had not previously appealed to. He had a dream in childhood that he never wavered from despite having parents who were very negative about anything related to entertainment. It was hardest for Garrison's father to say, 'wow, you done great'. For a long time he disapproved of what [my father] was doing but after 25 or 30 years of success I think it did catch on with my grandparents eventually."

In 1980, Minnesota Public Radio began to distribute the show nationally. Since then it has had some changes of name and format but is essentially the same mixture of songs, sketches, poems, and guest musicians. It broadcasts live for 35 weeks of the year, with about a third of the shows coming from St Paul and can be heard in the UK on the digital radio station BBC7, or on the web at www.prairiehome.org. Keillor still writes most of the show, producing 40 pages of script in a few days each week. And the highlight is still The News from Lake Wobegon, an extemporised 20-minute monologue that Time magazine described as an "out-of-body experience".

Jane Smiley says she always thought of the shows as being like a Sunday church service. "It has the singing and the audience responses and the sermon which is the Lake Wobegon story. He must live like a 19th-century vicar having to write his sermon every week. In some ways that's why it is so reassuring."

Happy to be Here, Keillor's first collection of Lake Wobegon stories, was published in 1982 and became a bestseller. Franken says: "There is a consistent quality in what he does and to the people who follow him and like his work he is Mark Twain. Of course there is a demographic factor involved. A friend of mine worked for Bill Cosby when Garrison was on the cover of Time magazine with a headline saying he was the funniest man in America. Apparently Cosby said, 'yeah, that's true if you're a pilgrim'." The Time cover came in the wake of the 1985 publication of a collection of stories called Lake Wobegon Days. And in Keillor's case the pre-laptop aphorism applied: when an English writer finds success they get a new typewriter, but when an American writer finds success they get a new life. Keillor's relationship with a producer of his show, Margaret Moos, ended around this time and at a school reunion he met Ulla Skaerved, who had been an exchange student from Denmark in 1960. They married the same year but two years later, in 1987, after a series of acrimonious privacy disputes with the local press, he announced the end of the radio show and that he was moving with Ulla to Copenhagen. However, after a few months of speaking "the Danish of a 12-year-old who's been married twice", the couple were back in America, but this time, on Ulla's prompting, living in New York. Keillor says he then "finagled" himself an office at the New Yorker and speaks with an aching nostalgia about the thrill of writing for the magazine.

Angell says "he was made for the New Yorker in that he was original and light and assured and intelligent. He reminded me a lot of EB White, who had the same general combination of talents." Scholl says he sees this time "as a watershed in his career. In contemporary jargon, this period, for around five or six years, marks a 'mid-life crisis'. After ending the long continuous run of Prairie, he was much more willing to express political views, to use more 'daring' - sexualised - material, and didn't try so hard to remain 'in character' as the Man from Lake Wobegon."

In 1987, Keillor published his next Lake Wobegon collection, Leaving Home. Spalding Gray, another American master of the monologue (who was recently in the news when he was reported missing), claimed that at their worst, "many of these stories are like honey-coated breakfast cereal. They give you a sugar rush only to let you crash by mid-morning", but more often he admiringly observed how "each detail collapses on to another" so the stories "fall together like a row of dominoes, leaving you more with a memory of motion than of content. When these tales work, as they often do, they are like American Zen, about 'sweet single-minded people' who work when they work and eat when they sit down to eat."

Another collection, We Are Still Married, came in 1989 and in 1991 his first full-length novel, WLT: A Radio Romance, which was set in the period just before television became the primary source of mass entertainment. Smiley says: "I thought it was a wonderful novel. Its particular charm was his insight into how his characters at the radio station sent their best selves out over the airwaves and once they had done that they were left with a residue of resentment and lust and all their worst feelings. I think that is quite a profound evocation of being. It works on a metaphorical and philosophical level." Kling says Keillor is himself "a perfectionist while appearing to be very casual. He's so much better at what he does than anyone else is or can be that he gets very little really useful help. So he writes most of what is heard on the two-hour show and no matter how loose it might be on Friday or even Saturday morning, it comes off perfectly, live on Saturday night. He's demanding and needs to be. He can be incredibly generous and kind while having no ability to suffer fools (unless he's studying them for material). He can be warm and distant in the same day."

In the early 90s, when Tina Brown was appointed editor of the New Yorker, Keillor resigned, bemoaning the loss of the magazine's soul. Some eyebrows were raised that he, although a relatively recent recruit to the New Yorker staff, should have taken it upon himself to become the publication's conscience. But it is indicative of the magazine's place in his writer's psyche. At around the same time Keillor's marriage to Ulla ended. He moved back to Minnesota and is now married to violinist Jenny Lind Nilsson, who has played on the radio show and with whom he wrote the children's book, The Sandy Bottom Orchestra (1996). They have a daughter, Maia, who is six. Keillor published his second novel, Lake Wobegon Boy, in 1997 and a bildungsroman, Lake Wobegon Summer 1956, in 2000. In between came a satiric autobiography, Me, of a character very much like the wrestler turned Minnesota governor, Jesse "The Body" Ventura.

While Lurie says she can appreciate a critical reservation sometimes levelled that Keillor's novels can be uneven, she says "he is probably our best American humorist and yet he is much more than just a humorist. I think he might not be appreciated by serious readers as much as he should be because he is funny and has such a popular following. He has a lot of feeling for a wide range of people. America is so many different places, but there is a very large section of America that people on the coasts sometimes call 'flyover America'. And there are many, many small towns where people will absolutely recognise Keillor's world. There are many more places like Lake Wobegon than there are places like Manhattan."

Scholl says that while he doubts any of Keillor's published writings will ever attain the canonical stature or status of a book like Huckleberry Finn, "I do believe he has already equalled the recognition and staying power of 20th-century humorous writers such as James Thurber and essayists like EB White, one of his early idols."

And Keillor is determined to keep himself in a position where he can carry on writing. After giving up smoking three decades ago, he gave up drinking two years ago. "I was drinking too much so I thought why don't I just stop. All these years you tell yourself you're doing it because you enjoy it and not because of some dark compulsion. I realised that if that was not the case I would have to go off on some programme and sit on folding chairs and drink coffee out of styrofoam cups and weep with a group of people I really didn't want to be with. I enjoyed drinking alcohol a great deal. But you get to a certain age and you have to weigh the cost of feeling that the next morning. I like to write in the morning and I didn't like to wake up feeling foggy. This is more so as you get older - and I have a lot of work I still want to do."

As well as the radio show and his magazine articles, he is working on a Lake Wobegon film project with director Robert Altman and is finishing off a book called Why I Am A Democrat. His friend Pederson says that perhaps earlier in his career he was more conscious of his audience's reaction to political content. "But his views haven't changed that much and now that he is so established I think he regards it as his moral duty to speak out. It is something that is important to him."

"Initially my publishers were not keen on the book but now they are," says Keillor. "The time is right for it and the primary reason I am a Democrat is that they take the idea of justice seriously and justice is the sine qua non of our society. The simple idea of a social compact is required for civilised life. If you are in serious need I'll rally to your side, and you will do the same for me. That is the assumption that enables us to travel around the world and get outside our tribe: without it all life is brutal. And looking around, it is a tragedy that life is indeed brutal for a great many people in America today."